[Boxkite]

Utility resellers' business is based on customers having credit in their accounts, the more the better.

[skydriller]

I don't understand why millions of people give companies money for free.
Am I the only one that gets sent a bill, then just pays it?

Regards, SD..

[johnm]

I don't understand why millions of people give companies money for free.
Am I the only one that gets sent a bill, then just pays it?

Regards, SD..

No but here in the UK where privatisation is king then paying by DD is cheaper because unless you pay attention you will be banking with your utility provider at a lousy rate of interest.

They keep trying to up my DD and I keep telling them no because if I end up in debt I'll happily pay it off. It's a constant battle.

The UK also has the most expensive energy in Europe apparently because privatisation makes things cheaper due to greater efficiency and doesn't pay shareholders handsome dividends and management inflated salaries....

[chevvron]

I don't understand why millions of people give companies money for free.
Am I the only one that gets sent a bill, then just pays it?

Regards, SD..

No I get paper bills every quarter and pay them at the Post Office for which I get a notarised receipt because sometimes the electricity company claims I haven't paid.

[Boxkite]

I don't understand why millions of people give companies money for free.
Am I the only one that gets sent a bill, then just pays it?

Regards, SD..

No I get paper bills every quarter and pay them at the Post Office for which I get a notarised receipt because sometimes the electricity company claims I haven't paid.

Which company, you two?

[riverrock83]

I'm with Octopus. They let me set the DD amount. I've always had a negative balance with them for the past few years... I just make sure it doesn't become ridiculous.

[chevvron]

I don't understand why millions of people give companies money for free.
Am I the only one that gets sent a bill, then just pays it?

Regards, SD..

No I get paper bills every quarter and pay them at the Post Office for which I get a notarised receipt because sometimes the electricity company claims I haven't paid.

Which company, you two?

British Gas for both gas and electricity. I was previously with SSE for electric but they transferred my account to OVO Energy who wanted DD and monthly billing (and flatly refused quarterly billing) so I switched to Br Gas. OVO also overcharged me when they started sending me estimated bills with no evidence to support them; I tried sending them actual readings but they ignored them.

[skydriller]

EDF... They send me a paper bill because you still need a paper bill with your name and address on it occasionally...
But I generally pay online and keep Electronic copies of all bills.

[Lefty]

Hi

I'm looking to get smart meters installed in two properties to take advantage of the Octopus tracker rates.
However I have some technical issues and it seems impossible to speak to someone at my current supplier who has any technical knowledge.
My issues are:
1. At both properties the gas and electric meters are some distance from each other (10 and 20 metres) and I'm being told that they need to be within 1 metre of each other. Is this so?
2. Do smart gas meters need an electrical supply to power them as one is on an outside wall away from power?
3. One of the gas meters is outside a block of flats where it is likely to get vandalised. Will the energy company move the meter at their expense?

Any advice would be most welcome.

The smart meter comms module should be able to cope with those distances quite easily. I worked on the design of the comms module for Toshiba. The gas meter only has a low powered transceiver powered by a long life battery which only sends a small packet of data (just the number of units consumed in last 24 hours) to the main comms module which is attached to, and powered by the electricity meter. This comms module is quite a powerful little beast and does all the calculations of units used vs tariffs to produce the instant display of real time electricity usage and cost. Once per day, the gas and electricity usage usage and costs are uploaded to your supplier’s IT system (via a convoluted route).


Why not utilise the home wifi system?
The government is very scared of anyone hacking their way into the energy companies IT system by hacking into the uploads from the smart meters. To prevent this, the government specified that all comms modules must use a special high grade encryption - specified and tested by GCHQ. So special, that none of the off the shelf encryption chips were considered good enough and we had to get the encryption chip manufacturers to design and manufacture a one off specific chip to meet the GCHQ requirements.

All of this complexity is because the UK authorities decided that the consumer “needed” to have a real time display of electricity usage.

Another country, not very far from us, took a very different approach. They specified that their meters should be relatively “dumb” and just send usage data back to the retail seller, with all the tariff calculations being done on their mainframe computers. Customers who wanted real time data, simply logged on to their suppliers system via a simple web app. This simplistic approach means that their “smart meters” cost a fraction of the UK’s version.